Power Grid Resilience: Data Gaps for Data-Driven Disruption Analysis

A resilient and reliable power grid is crucial for energy security, sustainability, and reducing service restoration time and economic burdens to society. Electric utility companies and power system regulatory bodies rely on metrics based on tracked data to assess the power grid’s reliability and plan for future needs. While reliability and resilience are often used interchangeably, their distinction should be recognized. Reliability assumes the power grid is operating under standard system conditions; resilience requires a disruption to occur to be evaluated and measured. Historically, reliability standards have been tracked with standardized metrics and enforced with great oversight to plan for predicted contingencies. However, power grid resilience has not been tracked and metrics remain elusive for utilities and regulatory authorities needing to ensure system performance in the changing context of power grid operations and development. In this paper, we evaluate existing power grid data sources (the Department of Energy’s Electric Emergency Incident and Disturbance Events form, DOE-417, a mandatory form for electric utilities) and identify data gaps that adversely impact data-driven resilience analysis. We consider different event types and their system-wide implications to evaluate how the missing data can impact power grid resilience assessments.